I've looked thru the BIOS and do not see a method for enabling staggered HDD spin-up. Does one exist somewhere else?

Hmm..

I was under the impression that AHCI was enabled by default when using SATA Raid. My OS uses Raid 0 and DATA uses Raid 1. All 4 disks are SATA.

On a related side note, my system has 2 optical drives connected via IDE but under IDE AHCI two erroneous and redundant ATA channels appear in Device Manager. Neither the system nor I can find any drivers that satisfy these redundant ATA 0 and ATA 1 channels.

My mobo is a 760-A1 running Vista Ult 64.

Thx for your help in sorting this out.

Ah, I found the Spin-Up feature. TY

Now, how to setup a hot pluggable drive? What is the correct setup to enable this capability on a 760-A1 board? I found some useful intel from Intel but it assumes the reader already has a substantial amount of technical background and is not User friendly. http://www.intel.com/technology/serialata/pdf/rev1_1.pdf

tocguy

Ah, I found the Spin-Up feature. TY

Now, how to setup a hot pluggable drive? What is the correct setup to enable this capability on a 760-A1 board? I found some useful intel from Intel but it assumes the reader already has a substantial amount of technical background and is not User friendly. http://www.intel.com/technology/serialata/pdf/rev1_1.pdf

Hot Plug is not available for drives running in AHCI mode on a controller set to RAID, thats the only thing you sacrifice when setting the controller to RAID compared to AHCI.

To set Hot Plug you would need to set the Controller to AHCI Mode specifically.

Hot plug is the ability to stop and unplug a drive using the "Safely Remove Hardware" option in Windows and plug in a drive when your in windows instead of just when the machine is turned off.  Its being able to add/remove Hard Drives on the fly whilst in Windows.  I know you the OP is probably aware of this but just wanted to put that out there for others who may wonder what exactly Hot Plug is.  You have to stop these drives under windows before removing them and the controller needs to be set up for Hot Plug in order to plug in drives without it causing any issues as normally you wouldnt want to plug in a drive once your machine is on.

On the EVGA X58 boards with the eSATA Controllers i just set the JMicron 362 SATA Controller to AHCI to allow me to use eSATA Hard Drives correctly, they are really the drives hot plug is meant for but i guess some people may find it useful to be able to add/remove internal drives on the fly or possibly they need more than 1/2 eSATA Ports.

tocguy

Good info here. I thank everyone for their contributions.

Hmm, without having to run a potentially deadly experiment, by switching to pure AHCI do I then lose the RAID capability? Obviously, I wouldn't hot plug a Raid 0 drive but a Raid 1 Data drive or a Backup drive would be a possibility. I'm asking more out of curiousity right now than necessity but one never knows when this knowledge will come in handy. From the Intel intel I'm wondering what role the
Mechanical Presence Switches setting and Cold Presence Detect settings have on hot plug-ability.

unfortunately running in pure AHCI would mean no ability to set up a RAID array on that SATA Controller.

in my system (x58 3xSLI), my intel ports are set to raid and the jmicron's are disabled. i have a 3x hdd raid0, a hot-swap drive, and a dvd drive all connected to the intel ports.

i haven't had any issues with hot-swapping the drive at all...and the remove hardware icon is not present in the taskbar. i use the RST driver from intel while in windows.